


Epilogue

by E_Salvatore



Category: The Black Tapes Podcast
Genre: F/M, Gen, Tumblr Fic, kinda canon-compliant?, up until 2x11 at least
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-21
Updated: 2016-08-21
Packaged: 2018-08-10 04:31:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7830436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/E_Salvatore/pseuds/E_Salvatore
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The last of the automated messages is waiting for him when he gets home one evening, a blinking red light giving way to a string of numbers and a simple, stilted “come find me”.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Epilogue

The last of the automated messages is waiting for him when he gets home one evening, a blinking red light giving way to a string of numbers and a simple, stilted “come find me”.

As he keys the numbers into his GPS, Strand wonders why this message was left on his personal landline. He wonders if maybe he should call Alex, or even just Ruby – as long as someone knows where he’s going.

He doesn’t wonder where he’s going, already knows what – who – will be waiting for him when he gets there.

The coordinates take him to Pier 54, just in time for the last dying rays of sunlight to frame a painfully familiar silhouette with its – her – back to him. He feels weak as he kills the engine and climbs out of the car, but somehow finds enough energy to shut the door with an obnoxiously loud bang.

The setting sun forms a halo around her hair, wreathing her with wild curls as she turns with eyes familiar enough to freeze him in place.

Coralee smiles.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” She tells him. The first words she’s said to him in nearly two decades.

In so many ways, she’s something straight out of a nightmare. The ghost of his dead wife has haunted him for so long that he can’t even begin to process the sight of her; he’s not sure how he manages to catalog the fear in her eyes and the faltering of her smile.

“I buried you,” He rasps. “I mourned you.”

That wipes the smile off her face entirely, and Coralee lurches forward as if to approach him.

A hand hovers in mid-air, warding her off. It doesn’t feel like his own; not a single part of him feels like his own right now.

“I buried you,” Strand repeats slowly. “I mourned you. I thought you were dead, and I thought I was somehow responsible, and-”

The sun sets then, taking with it her wild curls and freeing him from the spell of her gaze. In the semi-darkness of twilight, Coralee is as she ever was – soft eyes and soft smile, with hands and hair that appear to be just as soft as he remembers them to be.

His feet seem to move on their own volition to close the distance between them, but his arms refuse to cooperate. They stand two feet apart; two feet and two decades apart.

“Richard,” She whispers; if he closes his eyes, would it sound just like the hundreds of times she’s whispered his name before? Or is there something different in her voice too now, the same something he spies lurking in her shiny eyes and her quivering smile?

“I thought you were dead, and it nearly killed me,” He doesn’t want to close his eyes, doesn’t want to pick up on that foreign change in her almost-familiar voice. But at the same time, he can’t look her in the eye as he speaks, can’t bear to see that same strange something in eyes he used to know better than his own. “The guilt of being responsible for a dead woman, the guilt of suspecting a dead woman.”

With his eyes closed, Strand can hear her breath hitch. It feels like a small victory, like the tiniest piece of proof that she might actually regret what she put him through. In any case, it’s enough to make him open his eyes and face her.

“I told Charlie about you.”

Coralee pales.

“She disowned me for it,” Strand adds after a pause, “disowned her father for her mother.”

“So she…” Coralee draws in a shaky inhale. “She didn’t believe you?”

He forces out a scoff. Somehow, it’s even less of a laugh than the earliest exhales he’d graced Alex with. “She didn’t want to. She loved you, after all.”

And wasn’t that just the cherry on top of the disaster that was Hurricane Coralee? His daughter abandoned him for the woman who only came into their lives to use them, picked her over Strand and never looked back, never once hesitated or doubted or, in the years since, considered forgiveness.

Coralee turns her back on him once more and braces her hands on the rusted railing that threatens to give away and plunge her into Elliott Bay. “I love her too,” Her use of present tense does not escape him. She turns to face him as he moves to mimic her stance, leaving a generous five feet of distance between them. “I loved you too, once,” Coralee tells him with a rueful grin, and her use of past tense doesn’t escape him either.

There’s no point in lying; after all, there’s no denying that he fell for her act all those years ago, going so far as to ask her to marry him and let her into his life with Charlie. “I loved you,” Strand admits, eyes fixed on the vast expanse of dark water ahead of them, “before. Before all of this, before I even knew about all of this. I loved you when it was just us,” And if he allows himself a small smile at the memory, it is a crooked one that she will never see, “and lunch dates and,” And if he laughs a bit at the memory, it is hollow and flat enough that she would never think to relate it to the full-bellied guffaws Charlie used to coax out of him, “that terrible diner you only put up with because Charlie loved the pancakes.”

Coralee makes no such attempts to hide her emotions. She laughs, and it is so, so close to that familiar, girly giggle of hers, but somehow not quite the same thing, and the fact that that foreign something has managed to lodge itself in her throat the way it’s taken up residence in her eyes and threaded invisible marionette wires through the corners of her lips deals a blow to some small, forgotten part of his heart. “That diner was awful, wasn’t it?”

He magnanimously grants her a half-chuckle in reply, and commits this new (wrong) symphony of their shared laughter to memory, filing it next to their old tune. Her laughter sounds strained towards the end, and it is almost a relief when it peters out to be replaced by the soft gurgling of the waves lapping at the pier. 

“I loved you after,” Coralee whispers, “when I knew it was too late but I desperately wished otherwise. After you pulled away from me and stopped looking at me the way you used to, after I realized how much I had to lose.” She turns away from him and inconspicuously swipes at her right cheek, but the white of her sweater stands out in the darkness and draws his eyes to the movement. “That’s why I asked for a child,” Coralee confesses, still staring out at the bay. “I wanted us to have a fresh start, another shot at being happy again.”

Strand can’t stop the hand that reaches up to pull at his hair in frustration. “I hated you for that,” He sighs. “I couldn’t believe that you would be cruel enough to bring another child into this lie.”

She shrugs. “I know. It made things easier for me, in a way. I could feel it, in those last few weeks – how absolutely furious you were at me, how everything you’d ever felt for me just withered and died after that.”

He’d hated her, yes, but a part of him had loved her still; a part of him had taken years to stop. She has to know that he didn’t just forsake her and their marriage overnight. “Coralee, I didn’t-”

“That’s how I knew what to do,” She interrupts him with a gentle smile, as if to say it doesn’t matter anymore, I don’t want to hear it anymore. “I knew there was only one way to make things right again. So when they came to me and asked me to turn on you again, I said no.”

They. He thinks he knows who she’s talking about, but what would be worse: for ‘they’ to be some sort of cult his father was possibly involved in, or an entirely new player, one more adversary to watch out for?

“And then I vanished,” Coralee says, as if that was that, as if it wasn’t a messy, painful, drawn-out process of her disappearing and him losing his mind and twenty years of hope and dread on his part, an endless, punishing cycle he’d gone through over and over again. She grins at him when she notices the silence she’s stunned him into with her casual summary of that ordeal. “You can’t threaten or blackmail a ghost, right? So that’s what I turned into.”

She keeps smiling at him, forcing her mask to stay in place, willing her eyes to play along.

And suddenly, standing there on a cold night, staring his un-dead wife in the eye and watching her pretend that everything’s alright, Strand realizes just how exhausted he really is. It’s been a long night, a long day, a long two decades. And this is his payoff, his reward after twenty years of searching and researching?

“Coralee,” He sighs, scrubbing at his suddenly-weary eyes. “Why are you here? Why now?”

Finally, that damned smile slips off her face. “I’m here to warn you, Richard. I’m not helping them anymore, but that doesn’t mean other people in your life aren’t either.”

Strand responds with a half-laugh, half-scoff. “After twenty long years, you’re here to tell me that I shouldn’t trust anyone?” He looks her in the eye as he says: “I learned my lesson a long time ago”; with you goes unsaid.

“Of course,” Coralee shakes her head, one corner of her lips quirking up. “I don’t know why I even bothered.”

“Is that all you came back for, then?” He looks at her out of the corner of his eye, and it reminds him of crowded dining halls and a familiar giggle at the other end of the room, attempts at subtlety and sheepish smiles whenever she caught him.

“I also came back to ask for your forgiveness, but…” She trails off with a smile and a shrug, and he finds himself smiling – just the slightest bit – in return.

“I thought I could,” Strand tells her honestly. “I really thought I’d be able to put all of this behind me if you ever came back and came clean to me.”

Coralee sighs. “It’s been too long though, hasn’t it?”

That, and the fact that seeing her after all these years still reopens wounds he thought he’d cauterized a long time ago. He can’t forgive her; maybe he won’t ever forgive her.

“It’s okay, Richard,” Coralee assures him, and to both of their surprises, he doesn’t flinch or step away when she leans her head on his shoulder, the physical weight of her a familiar comfort untainted by the years that have passed and the otherness that lurks in her eyes and her voice.

“I’m sorry,” He offers feebly, a poor consolation prize to make up for the bitterness he can’t let go of.

“For what it’s worth,” She whispers, “so am I.”

They stand there for the longest time – a moment of silence for the end of something that had been dying a slow, painful death anyway - until he almost forgets why it can never again be like it was between them.

“I still want to help,” Coralee eventually says, pulling away from him. He watches as she straightens out her clothes and pushes back her hair, clears her throat and flits her eyes from his to the ground to his again.

And what can you say when your (legally) ex-wife returns from the dead and tells you she wants to help you in your crusade against the cult she worked for in the first place?

“Okay.”

Coralee nods. “Okay.”

She tucks her hands into her pockets and leaves without another word, waves goodbye to him right before she steps out of sight.

It’s – finally – the end of them, but Strand knows this won’t be the last time he sees her.

He doesn’t quite know how to feel about that.

**Author's Note:**

> One of my absolute favorite things (because I'm a masochist) is some good old "exes who might never get over each other but probably won't ever get back together again" angst. Lots of pining and reminiscing and closure. That's what I was aiming for here, but this feels too clumsy to be put in the same category as some of the more beautiful pieces I've read.
> 
> Happy post-season hiatus hell, fandom!


End file.
